Her desk felt too small the next morning, like someone had shrunk the universe and left her inside. People moved with the same frantic, efficient rhythm, but there was a different current under it now—something electric and dangerous, like a live wire running through the room. She could feel eyes on her. She could feel whispering. She could feel the printers plotting her demise.
The internal notice had not been a dream. It was very real. It was on every monitor. It had migrated into group chats. It had become a joke someone had already put into a meme. "Su Yao → CEO Project." The words repeated like a small, mocking drumbeat.
She'd packed her USB and a lunch the way a soldier packed a lunch—just in case. Shanshan had come by with a thermos and a face full of conspiratorial glee. "You look like someone who needs guts," she said and shoved the thermos into Su Yao's hand. "Drink this. It's not poison."
Su Yao sipped it nervously. It tasted like hope and a slight hint of regret.
Before she left the floor, Fang Min—who had been hovering like a stressed seagull all morning—cornered her. "Don't mess up," he whispered. "If the CEO sees you do something wrong, you'll be… noted."
"Noted how?" she asked.
"In the permanent registry of people who ruined their lives at Haiyun," Fang Min said solemnly. "Very official." He tapped his temple like a conspirator. "Just. Don't. Mess. Up."
She promised solemnly, which meant nothing, and then she walked toward the elevator like slow-motion footage.
The 48th floor greeted her like an institution. Tang Yichen looked up as she approached, face neutral as ever, hands folded. He gestured to the side, "You can set the bag here. He will be in the conference room." The way he said it made it sound like "he" was both the weather and the law.
Her legs felt like jelly. She kept her head down and practiced breathing—inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth, repeat until you stop being terrified. She opened the frosted glass door and walked into the meeting room which smelled faintly of lemon and power and not-fitting-in.
Xiao Le was there, of course. He was always there. He sat at the head of the massive table like a black chess piece. Around him were three other people she recognized from emailed memos—a tech lead from Haiyun Cloud, a board secretary guy with a look of undisturbed boredom, and Wu Kexin from Tech Division, who glanced at her with the kind of curiosity a scientist has when they find a strange specimen.
He didn't look surprised to see her. He just looked—focusing. As if she were an exam and he had all the answers but wanted to watch how she failed.
"Ms. Su," he said. His voice was low, even, professional. "Welcome."
"Thank you, sir." She sounded like a frog in a school uniform. Her knees wanted to clap.
"We'll be moving you temporarily to my special operations," he continued, eyes on the tablet in front of him, then flicked a glance up like a scalpel. "You will be assisting with document integrity and client data reconciliation for the Haiyun Cloud Credit update. Your immediate supervisor will be Ms. Wu here."
Ms. Wu smiled politely. "We'll show you the ropes."
Su Yao nodded like a person in a trance. "Okay. Thank you."
"And," Xiao Le added, "I will be personally reviewing the summaries you submit at 5 p.m. daily for the next two weeks."
Something inside Su Yao went "oh." Like a small gear had shifted into an engine she didn't know how to handle. "Five… p.m. daily?" she asked, voice wobbling.
"Yes," he said simply.
The tech lead coughed. The board secretary tapped his pen. Wu Kexin said, "It will be good for integration."
Xiao Le rested his fingertips together. "Ms. Su, you understand the sensitivity of this project?"
"Yes." She hoped she sounded less like a cow and more like someone who could breathe.
"Good." He folded his hands. "You may start tomorrow morning. Report to Wu for the initial walkthrough. Tang, make sure her access permits are in order."
Tang bowed. "Yes, sir."
The meeting dematerialized. People stood, papers shifted, the world resumed. Su Yao felt like someone had handed her a grenade with a ribbon and told her to run and smile. She walked out of the conference room clutching a sheaf of documents and a heartbeat the size of a gavel.
She had to walk past the little assistant desk again. Tang Yichen offered her a small, almost sympathetic nod. "You'll do fine," he said, which was surprising because he wasn't usually a motivational speaker. "Just… don't forget to breathe."
"Okay," she said. She actually attempted to breathe properly for once. It helped a little.
The next morning, Wu Kexin toured her through the warren of internal dashboards and code snippets like a general showing a new soldier where the trenches were. The work was… boring, technical, exacting—data formatted wrong, headers misaligned, clients' names in inconsistent encoding, files that refused to be friendly.
At first the team treated her like a temporary placeholder. But she started to do what Su Yao did best: she paid attention. She caught the tiny errors nobody liked to fix anymore; she made small notes in the margins with careful handwriting; she compiled a pilot summary that was tidy and honest. It wasn't flashy. It was dependable. It was the kind of work that doesn't get love poems written about it, but quietly, it made things easier for people who had deadlines.
At 4:50 p.m., her chest started doing the thumping thing. The 5 p.m. deadline he'd set felt like a bell. She uploaded the summary and a clean spreadsheet and sat back, hands tangled in her skirt like someone tying knots to keep from falling.
Her phone buzzed with a calendar notification that read: "CEO Review — 5:00 PM — Conference Room." She felt the entire office shrink.
She carried the printed documents upstairs like they were fragile heirlooms. Her palms were sweaty. She knocked on the glass door and pushed it open like a person entering a lion's den with a casserole.
Xiao Le sat where he always sat: quiet, patient, the silhouette of someone who had taught himself how to be still. He didn't look at the paper at first—he looked at her. An odd pause lengthened; everything in the room became an orchestra of small noises: the clock faintly, the city beyond the windows, the whisper of fabric.
"Sit," he said.
She sat. She placed the documents on his desk. Her hands trembled so slightly the paper made small, embarrassed fluttering noises.
He leafed through them quickly—no dramatics—just efficient scanning. Then he looked up. "Your summary is clear. The error rate you found on client ID mismatches is acceptable for this stage. But the data normalization in section three requires a different conversion script."
He clicked a few times and sent a direct message to Tang. Tang nodded once and then opened a window to show her.
"You'll need to run a conversion with the alternate script," Xiao Le said, eyes not leaving her face. "I'll have IT prioritize the resources."
"Yes, sir," she said. She felt a small bloom of pride even though it also came with the embarrassment of having the CEO watching her work like it was the finale of some show. "I'll run it tonight."
"No." His reply was soft but firm. "Run it now. I want to see how your results compare."
Now her cheeks really heated. "But it— it's after work hours—"
He tilted his head fractionally. "I'm asking."
She opened her mouth and closed it. The sentence that might have escaped—"I have a life"—died like a moth in a closet.
Tang placed a portable terminal on the desk. "It will take thirty minutes," he said. "We can monitor."
She swallowed. "Okay."
She connected, ran the script, watched the lines parade by like falling rain. Tang explained quietly the logs and helped her interpret them. Xiao Le remained quiet, watching, a stillness that hummed like a tuned wire. Occasionally he would glance and offer a one-sentence hint—"Check the hex on line forty" or "Normalize the date format first"—that landed like small, precise tools.
The conversion completed. Tears of relief threatened like mist. She exported the results. The error rate dropped. Tang's eyes brightened a tiny, corporate-approved smile.
Xiao Le took the printouts, scanned them, and for the briefest of moments, his face seemed to unlatch. Not a real smile—no—just the faint relief of someone who had been waiting to see evidence of competence where he had hoped it would be. He tapped the papers, then tapped the screen, then looked at her.
"You are thorough," he said.
"Thank you," she managed.
He uncrossed his hands and leaned slightly forward. "You work well under pressure," he added.
Her chest swelled with a strange mixture of embarrassment and pride. She'd wanted to be invisible; instead, he was praising her.
And somewhere under the praise, under the spreadsheets and the watchful pauses, something else flickered in his eyes. Something like recognition and something like sorrow. But he did not speak the word that might have broken both of them—he did not mention Qinghe, the camphor tree, the winter, the lost little hand.
Because rules, he knew, were safer than memories. And yet, he had her next to him now, running scripts at his request. He would learn her habits. He would catalog her strengths. He would watch the bracelet at her wrist like a map.
By the time she left that night, the sky beyond the windows had folded into city silver and the lights from the riverside blinked on like tiny, polite stars. Tang walked her to the elevator. "Good job today," he said.
She wanted to cry happy, terrified tears. "Thank you," she said.
Someone down the hall snorted, which was probably Guo Qiang. The office made a thousand small noises about her transfer—some whispering, some jealousy, some curiosity—but the core thing remained: she had a job on the CEO's project now. She had his attention in ways she could neither explain nor control.
Outside, the wind smelled like coming rain. As she stepped into the metro crowd and held onto the strap, the city moved around her. Her phone vibrated—Shanshan: "You okay? Did he say you were good? Do you still have a pulse?" Then Chen Wei: "See you tomorrow. Bring stamina."
She typed back clumsy answers and watched her reflection in the subway window. The bracelet caught the light.
Her heart beat a little faster.
She had survived day one of a different kind of job. She didn't know if it would save her or break her. She only knew one thing: for the first time in a long time, she felt visible.
And somewhere above the city, behind glass that mirrored the skyline, Xiao Le closed his office door, looked at the screen where her results sat, and felt the old ache whisper awake again. He told himself he would be careful. He told himself this was only work.
But he had already decided: he would keep watching.